In 2008, the Youth Law Center launched the Quality Parenting Initiative (QPI) in Florida and California as a pilot advocacy project committed to ensuring that all children in care have excellent parenting and lasting relationships so they can thrive and grow.
Today, QPI is a national movement spanning more than 80 jurisdictions and brings together thousands of caregivers, birth parents, youth, advocates, judges, attorneys, researchers, and public agency leaders working to transform foster care around excellent parenting and lasting relationships.
QPI is an advocacy strategy, method, and approach to transforming a foster care system so that it can support family care. It is built on the understanding that consistent, excellent parenting and meaningful relationships are the most basic needs and key rights of children and youth in foster care. Systems must ensure that every policy and practice enhances rather than undermines their ability to meet these needs.
Recent QPI innovative advocacy strategies include:
- Establishing the Champions model and training over 1,000 local community members as advocates and leaders of change.
- Launching Quality Parenting Outreach (QPO), a text-based data collection system used by QPI sites to directly engage all foster parents and kin in agency decision-making.
QPI has brought about important changes in policies and practices at the federal, state, and local levels designed to safeguard children’s relationships, their ability to live with families, and their participation in typical childhood experiences. Examples of QPI policy impact include new policies and practices that require improvements such as youth and family involvement in decision-making processes, ensuring vital information is shared with foster parents and kin, supporting positive relationships between biological, foster, and extended kinship families, implementing age-appropriate visitation and smooth transitions for children, and prioritizing child-centered placement practices.
Read more about the impact of QPI through YLC’s impact report.